I Like #122

What a truly fabulous week this has been.  Mostly because I got to spend it with my parents and sister and kids at my folks' place in Ruidoso New Mexico. So wonderful my heart clenches up when I have to leave.


So a small selection of the goodness from this week:

1. I like the views.  Along the way you get the gorgeous skies over the eastern NM prairie and then the sunset over the mountains once you're there.

2. I love the kids.  I don't share too many pictures of them, but the people really are the best part.  This time I got some great snaps of my dad teaching Alex to play rummikub (including one of Alex picking his nose) and my mom teaching Anna.  They're such fun!

3. I love 4th of July and parades!  It reminds me of all the good things about being an American!  We went to the 4th of July parade in Capitan this year-  it's a very small town but has the big 4th of July parade in that part of the world.  It's the home of Smokey the Bear, so of course he was in the parade, in addition to all the typical fun parade stuff.  One other highlight was this super fun dog in a tutu and top hat!

4.  I love wildlife (mostly)!  We saw several large herd of elk around town, but I didn't get any pictures of them.  I also caught this roadrunner in a median while at a stop light!  I was so excited-in spite of it being the state bird of NM, I'd never seen a roadrunner in Ruidoso before.  And some less exciting wildlife-  the last morning I was there we had a rainstorm and HOARDES of snails came out and infested the driveway and flower beds.  They crawled all over the stuff I was loading in the car and one I didn't noticed even came back to Oklahoma with me!  I squashed it-  I don't want them anywhere near my flower beds.

5.  I love Monjeau and Crest Trail!  One of my favorite places to hike and picnic as a kid was Monjeau lookout and Crest Trail  (I loved Crest Trail so much I made a quilt of it).  Unfortunately, a few years ago the whole area was devastated by a forest fire, and we hadn't been back since.  But this trip, Becky and I took the kids up to climb on the rocks (a favorite pasttime), see the lookout tower, and enjoy a short bit of hiking.  One of our good friends used to work in the lookout tower fire spotting when she worked for the Forest Service.  In spite of the terrible (and still evident fire damage), undergrowth is starting to come back.  Low lying scrub and baby aspens are the most prevalent.  And one of the most exciting things is that one of our favorite huge landmark trees was bypassed by the fire!

We were trying to make 25 with our hands (the trail number) but the little kids were taking the pictures (about a million) and kept cracking us up.

6.  I love new hiking trails!  My mom and dad took us hiking on some new hiking trails in a different area that wasn't burned.  The trails are beautiful and were developed in partnership between the Forest Service and a group called EcoServants.

When I was a kid, we used to drive past the old, out of commission ski area on our way up the mountain to the ski area.  It had several old lifts and stuff and my mom said she skied there one time as a college-aged kid.  Little did I know that there was an even older ski area in the area.  When on this new hike (in an entirely different part of the forest from the ski area), we walked past this area and my dad told us it was the ski area when he was a kid there.  Really just a slope with a tow rope (long gone) but so cool to think about.  It still has the cleared feel of an open ski run. 

7. I love taking the dogs!  Becky brought her dog Auto (AKA Blue's very best friend of all time), and all the dogs had a blast playing together.  Blue and Auto especially never slowed down long enough to get a good picture of them.  

I got back on Sunday night, and I know everyone will be pleased to be spared pictures of my dahlias for a week (don't worry, they did fine without me).  Blue was sulky about leaving Auto, but he's coming to visit in just a few weeks.  I hope everyone had a great week!  Click on over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!